Environmental Solution: Recyclable Grocery Bags

Recyclable grocery bags are cheap, more spacious than plastic or paper bags, and extremely beneficial to the environment. Obviously they don't do something to directly improve the environment. However, they replace plastic and paper bags that directly harm the environment. I know my writing skills aren't good enough to truly inspire you, because I'm only in 11th grade and still take spelling tests. However I've been taught that "appeal to logos" (facts) is the strongest technique of persuasion. So here are some facts for you... I work as a bag-boy at a local grocery store. After a 7 hour work shift, I use approximately 300 plastic bags to bag customer groceries. The grocery store I work for employs over 5,000 front service clerks (bag-boys). So let's say every bag-boy works a 7 hour shift in a week (which is very realistic). That equals 1,500,000 plastic bags used each and every week. You are probably thinking "I recycle all my plastic bags anyways." Well, research from Natural Marketing Institute shows that 40 to 50 percent of Americans recycle, this means the other 50 percent of Americans don't recycle.

This means that 750,000 plastic bags are not recycled each week, and this just includes the particular company I work for. The time it takes for a single plastic bag to decompose is estimated to be between 500 to 1,000 years, in other words, a really really long time. So how can you help by using recyclable bags when you already recycle plastic bags? Well maybe, just maybe, if everyone uses recyclable bags then a chain reaction will occur and before you know it everyone is using them. It's worth a shot.